Summer Reading

It’s too hot to blog. The Bay Area is in the grip of a heat wave. The U.S. is playing Ghana in the World Cup. So much book news is depressing:

More on Bay Area bookstore closures.

Slate has a gallery of photos of people reading in unusual places. (via Bookslut)

Oprah magazine has its “First Ever Summer Reading Issue.” It’s very yellow. Some of the tidbits I’ve gleaned:

30: Number of rejection letters John Grisham got before selling his first novel.

28: Percent by which literary reading has dropped among 18 to 24 year olds since 1982.

“Liebrary” is a cool looking new board game that is a “bookworm’s Balderdash.”

Harper Lee breaks her silence to write a letter about how she learned to read. She grew up in the Depression. "Books were scarce. There was nothing you could call a public library, we were a hundred miles away from a department store's books section, so we children began to circulate reading material among ourselves until each child had read another's entire stock."

If you buy a book from Oprah’s recommended reading list, you can get an additional 10% off at Amazon. (At checkout enter code oprahmag)

The blogger at So Many Books likes some of the issue, but chides Oprah for only recommending books put out by big publishers.